Re: Bug#333603: ITP: acpica-unix -- an ASL compiler/decompiler

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org>

> The copyright notice says "all rights reserved" right before the
> rest of the license spells out several rights which are, in fact,
> not reserved.

Those several rights are probably (I haven't read the full license)
granted only subject to certain conditions. It's not that farfetched
to imagine that you need to reserve the rights before you can release
them on conditions later.

But in fact "All rights reserved" is just legal boilerplate that has
no freedom-related consequences at all. It used to be (before the USA
joined the Berne treaty, iirc) that this particular language was a
formal necessity for asserting any copyright in the first place.
Lawyers stick to it because of the odd chance that its absence might
impress somebody to think, contrary to legal reality, that the work is
not properly copyrighted. Many lay programmers stick to it because
they don't know better. It is not harmful, so we generally ignore it.


Not having read the entire license, I will not comment on its freedom
in general. Go to -legal if interested.

-- 
Henning Makholm   "And here we could talk about the Plato's Cave thing for a
                while---the Veg-O-Matic of metaphors---it slices! it dices!"